Pew study shows Democrats get more stressed out over cognitive dissonance over politics than Republicans:

Democrats feel more negatively about talking politics with people who have a different opinion of the president than do Republicans. A large majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents – nearly seven-in-ten (68%) – say they find it to be stressful and frustrating to talk to people with different opinions of Trump. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, fewer (52%) say they find this to be stressful and frustrating.

White Democrats and Democratic leaners are more likely than black and Hispanic Democrats to say it is stressful and frustrating to talk to people with different opinions of Trump. About three quarters of white Democrats (74%) say it is frustrating, compared with 56% of black Democrats and 61% of Hispanic Democrats.

And if you thought the worst offenders were shrieking middle-aged single Whole-Foods-shopping Subaru-driving women with degrees in Political Science from Saint Olaf?

Of course you were right:

Overall, more women (64%) than men (54%) say talking to people with a different opinion of Trump is stressful and frustrating. And adults under 30 are more likely to say they find these discussions interesting and informative than do those 30 and older (42% vs. 33%).

Which proves that my anecdotal observations are just as accurate as science.

It’s become something of a low-impact cult on the left to declare oneself “driven by science”.

This “drive” usually manifests less in the form of “being able to develop a testable, falseable hypothesis” or design a valid, controlled course of experiements than in believing Neil DeGresse Tyson is the dreamiest or posting Bill Nye memes on social media, of course. But to each their own.

Of course, behind all the “I F****ng Love Science” reposts and the articles about those dumb flat-earthers, actual comprehension of science is often pretty weak.

(The response is usually a political, not scientific, one; “you think they choose to be gay? Of course not. Point is, there are more than one possible answer – and while “Nye-ence” is perfectly fine drawing “scientific” conclusions from political data, science isn’t).

Netflix edits history – cutting out the part of a 20-year-old Bill Nye episode about there being precisely two genders.

Because science!

(Note for bobbleheads: It would be appropriate for Nye to explain why he’s reversed course; since he styles himself a “Science Guy”, perhaps he’d include some evidence that led to his conclusion, rather than just a perfunctory flush of the memory toilet.

Plainly, this is a meritless lawsuit, brought by some whiner hoping to strike it rich. There is no air pollution in Paris. There can’t be: that’s where the Paris Accord was signed, which eliminated all air pollution and thereby saved the planet from global warming before President Trump condemned us by withdrawing the United States.

If the air in Paris were that bad, they wouldn’t be complaining about who’s still in the “save-the-planet” group, they’d be fixing the problem.

Wouldn’t they?

Joe Doakes

As Glenn Reynolds says, “I’ll believe climate change is an emergency when its advocates start acting like it’s an emergency”.

When I was a kid, having a tattoo meant that you were either a veteran or had been in prison; it was fairly easy to tell which by the content and quality of the “art”-work.

That’s probably one reason I’ve never succumbed to the trend.

In a just world, this would be prosecutable as a war crime – in the war between taste and tastelessness, beauty and ugliness. That war is, thus far, undeclared; it’s an insurgency. The Charlies are, unfortunately, winning.

But many have; some stats say over a third of all adults below the age of 40 have some kind of tattoo or another. Some have gone completely overboard; men and women with “sleeves” (tattoos running up their arms), college age women with huge obnoxious tattoos covering vast swathes of skin.

Look – a clever, tasteful tattoo here and there can be fun. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not my style, but knock yourself out.

But there are few things in the world quite as depressing as sitting at the pool and seeing a gorgeous woman in a bikini, looking hand-tooled saddle from neck to waist, shoulder to wrist, hip to knee.

An aesthetic atrocity? I don’t think I’m overreacting, here.

But let’s forget about aesthetics for a while. Let’s focus on science.

One thing that’s always skeeved me out about tattoos is that you are puncturing one of your body’s most fragile yet essential organs – one that is designed to protect the rest of your body – thousands of times, and impregnating it with chemicals containing God only knows what.

Hey, baby. I’m covered in toxic chemicals, applied by someone whose big goal in life was to be a staff artist at “Heavy Metal” magazine.

FDA has not approved any tattoo pigments for injection into the skin. Tattoo parlors are regulated by the state and city, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not require manufacturers to release their ink’s ingredients; doing so could supposedly give away trade secrets.

One yuge takeaway?

An alarming research study recently published by Dr. Bob Haley and Dr. Paul Fischer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas uncovered that the “innocent” commercial tattoo may be the number one distributor of hepatitis C.

And it gets worse.

If you have some bobbleheaded Millennial or X-er in your life who’s contemplating getting this systematic scarring and contamination, send ’em the link.

New York Times opinion column explains why shutting down conservative speakers on college campus is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech. The key is the kind of speech being shut down; i.e., speech that offends people. This is not a new idea, it’s a bad old idea dressed up in fancy new credentials.

You see, some speakers say things that are simply is wrong, like denying the Earth is flat. We know the Earth is flat, so we know the speaker is wrong. We’ve told Galileo so, repeatedly, but he keeps speaking the same falsehoods. Speaking a falsehood once is a mistake but repeating the falsehood after being corrected makes it an intentional falsehood: a lie. There is no right to speak a lie. Listening to lies and rebutting them repeatedly is tiresome and serves no public purpose; therefore, prohibiting the speaker from telling his lies is not a violation of his rights. Free speech, in this analysis, doesn’t mean you can say what you think; it means you can say what I want to hear.

Milton criticized the notion of intellectual “safe spaces” being more important than freedom of speech when he wrote: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and un-breathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” Areopagitica was written in 1644 but the battle is still being waged today.

In Liberal minds, you already are free. You are free to criticize Trump in any way you choose. You can express your disgust with Conservatives in words or gestures. Your choice of interpretive dance to decry tax rate reductions will never be questioned. Liberals will defend to the death your right to agree with the Narrative in your own special way.

Reminds me of a joke Reagan told. The American says “We have free speech in America. I can stand in front of the White House and yell ‘To Hell with Ronald Reagan.’” The Russian replies: “That’s nothing. I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell ‘To Hell with Ronald Reagan’ too.” He still could, on any college campus.

There was an episode of The Prisoner in which The Village held an art contest, no limits, express yourselves freely. Every painting and sculpture was an homage to the greatness of the dictator, Number 2. Nobody thought it the least odd. It was completely sensible that they’d take this opportunity to express their love of Number 2 in their own individual way.

I wonder if modern Liberals could understand the joke Reagan told and that episode of the Prisoner were meant to be ironic, but Milton was not. Is there that much learning remaining to be found on campus these days?

Joe Doakes

I was in a discussion about evolution with a group of liberals several years ago. They were all demanding absolute fealty to the theory of evolution. I asked why. They responded “it’s just weird that people are allowed to believe things that are such nonsense”.

I replied “What difference does it make if the person refinishing your countertops is a young earth creationist, as long as your countertops get done?” They phumphered something about it being important that people not completely “deny science”.

To which I responded “Science? You mean, like brain surgery? Something none of you “Science-based” people can do, but this utterly faith-based creationist has mastered? Are you going to lecture him about science, or are you going to get your brain fixed?”

The response had something to do with me being a misogynist or something.

In one of the most glorious moments in the history of cable television, the late Christopher Hitchens told Bill Maher’s audience – basically the same species of smug droogs that dutifully clap on command, just like Jon Stewart’s and Steven Colbert’s and Samantha Bee’s audiences, and those at pretty much every other liberal Bread and Circus show.

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Hitchens didn’t stanch the wave of smug liberals – indeed, they’ve only gotten worse since they’ve been relegated to the minority.

The left’s trait – condescend first (often, lately, by smugly wrapping themselves in a “scientific” banner that few understand and fewer still earn – has been most egregiously on display in last weeks’ flap over Bret Stephens’ apostasy on climate change.

Let’s be clear about what Stephens actually said. Here’s his summary of the current state of climate science: While the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. Here’s the translation: Science teaches us that humans have helped cause global warming, but when we try to forecast the extent of the warming and its effects on our lives, the certainty starts to recede. In addition, the activism has gotten ahead of the science. Indeed, Stephens even quotes the New York Times’ own environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin, who has observed that he “saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” Not only did the “hyperbole” not “fit the science at the time,” but — Stephens writes — “censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.” As if on cue, parts of liberal Twitter melted down. Stephens was instantly treated as, yes, an imbecile and a deplorable. Not only did the vast majority of commentators ignore his argument, they treated it as beneath contempt.

I have yet to have a liberal at any level answer this question for me:

Let’s say, for purposes of argument, that global warming is exactly what the Warmist faith says it is. OK – so why is “turning the keys to the entire world’s economy over to the people who’ve made the Congo a massive lake of blood” the only possible solution?

I sort of cringed when I watched the “Science March” – because “Science” is being dragged down the same Orwellian linguistic rathole that has claimed so many other once-useful/meaningful words.

At one point, science meant “You have a theory. You frame a hypothesis. You come up with experiments that can disprove the hypothesis. You publish the theory, the hypothesis, the experiments, and the results, with an aim toward allowing other scientists to check your work and see if your results could be repeated.

But this is demonstrative of the Left’s take on science: Science is actually just the name for anything the Left likes. Worried about the humanity of an unborn child? Concerned that fetuses have their own blood types and their own DNA? Stop it! You’re quoting science, not Science™! Wondering how it is that a genetic male is actually a woman? You’re worrying about science, not Science™!

This is the dirty little secret of the Left’s sudden embrace of Science™ — it’s not science they support, but religion. They support that which they believe but cannot prove and do not care about proving. Bill Nye isn’t interested in a scientific debate about global warming — how much is occurring, the measurement techniques at issue, the sensitivity of the climate to carbon emissions, the range of factors that affect the climate. He wants you to accept his version of the truth — not just that global warming is happening, but that massive government intervention is necessary in order to avert imminent global catastrophe.

Worse? This is just one front in the battle for something more important than science – the battle for the language itself.

I remember back in college, thirty-odd years ago, reading some rather dogmatic radical-feminist claiming that technology would soon make it possible for women to live lives, up to and including reproduction, completely without the need for men.

This is not news, it’s confirmation of what we already knew from anecdotal evidence. Adding more people to a committee does not increase committee intelligence, it just takes longer to get nothing done.

It’s settled science. You’re not a science denier, are you?

Joe Doakes

To the left, “settled science” means “comports with our narrative, so shut up”.

We took very precise, very careful climate temperature measurements that did not show the result we wanted, then ran them through a black box that nobody understands and we cannot replicate. And what do you know, now the results DO show the result we wanted. You can’t deny science.

Joe Doakes

When you politicize science, you don’t get scientific politics; you get politicized science.

“Note to the New York Times: ‘trouncing’ and ‘blown past’ are phrases appropriate to sports reporting, not science reporting. Except that no sports reporter would dare write an article in which he never bothers to give you the score of the big game. . . . It’s almost like they’re hiding something. And that is indeed what we find.”

Summary: Increase is one-hundredth of a degree but the Margin of Error is a tenth of a degree. So it’s all bullshit. No, worry, these are “alternative facts” but since it’s the Left doing it, that makes it alright.

Whenever your elite betters on the left thunder their jeremiads, telling you you need to adopt one or another of their draconian responses to some catastrophe just over the horizon, because science, remind them that the essence of science is disproving hypotheses.

New article in Nature says the Earth is getting greener, more plants sucking more CO2 out of the air.
The article mentions that elevated atmospheric CO2 explains some of the greening but carefully avoids linking CO2 levels to temperature. But if green plants suck CO2 out of the air, then shouldn’t global greening lower atmospheric CO2? And if global warming is caused by CO2, which more plants are now sucking out of the air, shouldn’t that mitigate global warming?
I wonder if the computer models used by climate scientists incorporate enough CO2 reduction due to global greening?
Joe Doakes

Ten years or so ago, when Germany embarked on a trillion-dollar campaign to phase out fossil and nuclear power and replace it with wind, the Greens, the Climate-Change Mafia and the media – along with a whooole lot of Green Energy scammers – applauded like Comintern members at a Stalin speech.

The government plans to cap the total amount of wind energy at 40 to 45 percent of national capacity, according to the report. By 2019, this policy would cause a massive reduction of 6,000 megawatts of wind power capacity compared to the end of 2015’s capacity.
“The domestic market for many [wind turbine] manufacturers collapses completely,” Julia Verlinden, a spokesperson for the German Green Party, told Berliner Zeitung. “With their plan, the federal government is killing the wind companies.” Verlinden goes on to blame the political influence of “old, fossil fuel power plants.”

They can “blame” the fact that “Green energy” is not economically sustainable.

When I was a kid, the world’s social justice warrior crowd warned us that the world was headed for inevitable catastrophic famine. Some of the very voices behind “global warming” today – Paul Ehrlich springs to mind – warned (and profited greatly from warning) us that India would be down to under 100 million people by 1990, and that Africa was going be pretty much revert to nature, its human inhabitants all starved out. Even the US was going to be the subject of “inevitable” food riots by the mid-eighties.

Naturally, the only possible remedy was to socialize the world economy.

It occurs to me that the Obama administration may be quietly supporting a Final Solution to global warming.

World population increased from 2 billion in 1950 to 7 billion today. All those extra people exhaling carbon dioxide, raising cattle that produce methane flatulence, heating their homes with natural gas, driving cars, charging their iPhones with electricity generated from burning coal . . . they all contribute to global warming. Hey, Liberals are right, global warming IS produced by mankind: the world simply has too many people emitting too much carbon.

It wouldn’t, if we could reduce world population back to 1950 levels. But how would we do it in a politically acceptable way? No Blood For Oil is still a favorite Liberal hymn.

If we support policies that undermine world-wide oil prices, the economy will collapse in oil-producing countries, leading to mass starvation, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.

If we release terrorists from Gitmo and also foment insurrection in Arab countries, civil war will break out leading to bloodshed, disease and starvation, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.

If we unleash the Ebola virus in Africa and the Zika virus in South America and warn women not to get pregnant for three years, we reduce the birth rate below replacement level, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.

If we let felons out of prison and decline to prosecute killers based on color, thousands will die in inner cities, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for wealthier Americans.

Europe is getting ready to eliminate millions of asylum seekers. North Korea is making noises – maybe a major war on that peninsula will draw in some neighbors to die fighting? And how are things between India and Pakistan right now, any chance they might massacre a few millions of each other’s citizens for us?

Genocide could turn out to be nicely guilt-free, as it’s not a choice, it’s a necessity to survive global warming. Settled science, doncha know? Maybe President Obama really will halt the rise of the oceans and begin the heal the planet. Boy, would I have egg on my face.

Minnesota – the state where everything that isn’t mandatory is banned – jumped down hard on “vaping”, the “smoking” of electronic cigarettes (or “e-cigs”). E-cigs, which create a vapor out of water with flavoring and nicotene, are a vastly lower-risk alternative to smoking cigarettes, without the tar and most of the known carcinogens.

Summary: people enjoying something that looked like, and bore a superficial relationship (there’s something that looks like smoke!) to something the ruling class abhors (but for the tax money) but the declassé enjoy? Ban it!

And so the state’s behavior police, sensing illicit enjoyment, leapt into action, grunting out a series of laws that, while scientifically vacant, made vaping the equivalent of smoking.

But with a little luck, the push for conformity may have taken a hit in, of all places, New York, with a judge noting the radical notion that, with vaping, nothing is burning:

“An electronic cigarette neither burns nor contains tobacco,” said the court. “Instead, the use of such a device, which is commonly referred to as ‘vaping,’ involves the inhalation of vaporized e-cigarette liquid consisting of water, nicotine, a base of propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin and occasionally, flavoring.”

And also, the subversive idea (at least in the age of Obama( that the law means what it says it means:

The issue was brought to the court in the case of People v. Thomas, after vaper Shawn Thomas was issued a citation on the subway and subsequently challenged the citation in court. New York law defines smoking as “the burning of a lighted, cigarette, pipe or any other matter or substance which contains tobacco.”